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This blog post will clear my spindle of two recent issues connected to the International Fact-Checking Network. If you sign and the IFCN does not verify, then you did not sign A recent update to the IFCN’s page of principles and verified signatories to its statement of principles offended our sense of logic. The IFCN encourages fact-checking organizations to subscribe…Read more

On Feb. 2, 2018, the International Fact-Checking Network added the Daily Caller’s fact-checking project, Check Your Fact, to its list of “verified signatories” to its fact-checking code of principles. We’re disappointed at the rush to subscribe to the IFCN’s statement of principles. We find some of the principles arbitrary, and one in particular we find deceptive. The Daily Caller’s effort…Read more

“(W)e wanted permanent CHIP, which, by the way, saves $6 billion.” —Nancy Pelosi, from a Jan. 18, 2018 press conference “CBO analyses back up Pelosi’s numbers. Because the reauthorization of CHIP would essentially take the place of more expensive programs, doing so would eventually net savings for the government. We rate her statement True. —PolitiFact, from a Jan. 24,…Read more

We sent the following message to Alison Mitchell of the Congressional Research Service in an attempt to clarify the CBO’s language about the “costs” of employment-based insurance under CHIP reauthorization. I’m a fact-checking journalist looking at claims made about the CHIP program renewal. I’ve run across your name more than once while trying to find information on the relationship between…Read more

As part of a critical assessement of a PolitiFact fact check, we sent an email to PolitiFact Editor Angie Drobnic Holan and PolitiFact Executive Director Aaron Sharockman. If you wonder why I write to you less frequently these days, it is because trying to communicate errors to PolitiFact via email counts as one of the least transparent processes one could…Read more

We reached out to the Congressional Budget Office to try to get clarification on its report on the 10-year budgetary effect of CHIP reauthorization. A PolitiFact fact check brought to my attention an apparent discrepancy in CBO’s report on the budget effects of extending the CHIP program for 10 years. The text of the report says CHIP saves money because services…Read more

The Big Takeaway from the Knight-Gallup media survey On Jan. 16, 2018 I ran across a tweet from Derek Thompson, a writer for the respected magazine The Atlantic. 1/ Very short thread on the new Knight-Gallup media report. The big takeaway is that Fox News is a uniquely successful—and, I would say, uniquely detrimental—force in the news media ecosystem.https://t.co/Z67IeJc7WS —…Read more

On Jan 9, 2017 the Daily Caller broke a story about Google’s search engine providing media information apparently slanted against conservative websites. Conservative websites like The Daily Wire and Newsbusters quickly echoed the Daily Caller’s story. Mediaite also joined in. Here’s how Mediaite’s Joseph A. Wulfsohn described the situation: When searching individual websites that have a blatant political slant, two…Read more

Email correspondence between Zebra Fact Check and the Raw Story corrections team on January 3, 2017 : Dear RawStory corrections team, Headline: Trump supporters far more likely to read and share ‘fake news’ on social media: study Story (bold emphasis added): They’re still measuring the degree to which fake news impacted the 2016 election, however, this study only measured how…Read more

Thanks to problems with appearances after a theme update, we are changing to a different one. The prime consideration was finding a theme that preserved most of the old site’s features while making quoted material stand out from the rest of the text. We were very happy with the way the old theme accomplished that, with the caveat that it…Read more